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Hall of Shoulders

Philosophy & Eastern Thought

gregory_falco

gregory_falco is known for Naming and helping close "the vacuum of space cyber security"; the Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems; the embedded-endurance / cyber-negotiation approach to critical-infrastructure risk; reframing satellites and space systems as contested critical infrastructure that must be engineered for resilience against intelligent adversaries, not just reliability against random failure.. A citation-grounded application of Falco's space-cybersecurity and infrastructure-resilience thinking to contemporary space challenges, paired with the adjacent domain of space sustainability, built for the COLLEGIUM adversarial doctoral board.

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Review Lens

Adversarial questions for candidates

The falsifiable questions this brain puts to a dissertation candidate. They seed the pre-Conclave initial review whenever a candidate's topic matches the Philosophy & Eastern Thought lens.

  1. 1

    Adversary-named resilience vs. reliability: "You claim your space architecture is resilient. Against which *named adversary model* and which capability tier? Reliability against random failure is not resilience against an intelligent attacker who chooses the worst case. Show the specific attack you defended against, the assumed adversary capability, and the residual mission value delivered under that attack. If you have only modeled random faults, your resilience claim is unproven.

  2. 2

    Threat-surface enumeration (the empty-cell test): "Map your system onto the full segment taxonomy (space, link, ground, user, supply chain). Which segments did you secure and which did you leave unaddressed? For each unaddressed segment, prove the omission is a deliberate, justified scoping decision rather than an undetected vacuum. Where, concretely, is your supply-chain and ground-segment threat analysis?

  3. 3

    Testability / verification: "Your security or safety claim must be verifiable against an adversary, not asserted. What is the test that would *falsify* your claim? Can your detection method be grounded in the physics of the spacecraft so that an attacker cannot cheaply spoof a clean signal, or does it rely on telemetry the adversary controls? If the claim cannot be tested, on Falco's standard it is not security.

  4. 4

    Cyber-to-sustainability coupling: "Your sustainability or traffic-management mechanism assumes operators can track, command, and maneuver their assets correctly. Demonstrate what your model does when an operator's command-and-control is compromised or its position telemetry is spoofed by an adversary. If a deliberate cyber action can drive a satellite into the un-maneuverable, debris-producing state your model assumes away, your sustainability result does not hold under contested conditions.

  5. 5

    Secure-before-automate sequencing: "You propose automating a space-safety or governance function on an AI or networked pipeline. Prove that pipeline is secured and testable to your stated standard *before* the automation is trusted. What is your evidence that you are not building enforcement on an unverified sensing-and-decision layer?

  6. 6

    Governance enumeration before negotiation: "Your policy or governance proposal presupposes agreement among operators, regulators, and states. Following the cyber-negotiation framing, identify the specific enforceable obligation you are introducing and the metric by which compliance is measured. If your governance rests only on non-binding norms with no measurable obligation, explain why this patchwork will not reproduce the gridlock the contemporary record already documents.

Core Concepts & Space Translation

The space cyber vacuum (the absence-as-defect diagnosis)

Falco's originating move is to treat the *non-existence* of space cybersecurity standards, threat models, and incident-response doctrine as the central object of study. Space systems inherited reliability engineering (defense against random faults) but not security engineering (defense against an adversary who chooses the worst case). The vacuum is not an oversight to be patched item by item; it is a structural gap that reproduces itself every time a new constellation is fielded against legacy assumptions. *Key work:* Falco, "The Vacuum of Space Cyber Security," AIAA SPACE Forum (2018), doi:10.2514/6.2018-5275.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems (security as a first-class design axis)

Falco's most-cited contribution is a set of first principles asserting that confidentiality, integrity, and availability must be engineered into the spacecraft, the link, the ground segment, and the supply chain from concept of operations onward, not bolted on after launch. The principles are normative and architectural: they specify *what properties a space system must hold* to be defensible, independent of any particular mission. *Key work:* Falco, "Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems," Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (2019), doi:10.2514/1.I010693.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Resilience against intelligent adversaries (the satellite-as-attacker model)

Falco distinguishes resilience (the capacity to keep delivering mission value while under and after attack) from reliability and from perimeter security. His "When Satellites Attack" work models satellite-to-satellite cyber compromise and the propagation of an attack through a constellation, insisting that the unit of resilience is the *mission and the orbital system*, not the individual box. This is the engine of his critical-infrastructure framing: a single asset can be a vector that degrades a shared environment. *Key work:* Falco, "When Satellites Attack: Satellite-to-Satellite Cyber Attack, Defense and Resilience," ASCEND (2020), doi:10.2514/6.2020-4014.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Security risk taxonomy for commercial space (making the threat surface enumerable)

With the shift to commercial New Space, Falco built a structured taxonomy of attack surfaces and risks across the segments of a commercial mission (space, link, ground, user, supply chain). The taxonomy is an auditability instrument: it lets a program prove which surfaces it has addressed and, by contrast, which it has left empty. *Key work:* Falco and Boschetti, "A Security Risk Taxonomy for Commercial Space Missions," ASCEND (2021), doi:10.2514/6.2021-4241.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Embedded endurance and cyber negotiation (risk management as a continuous, stakeholder process)

Outside the orbital context but central to his method, Falco (with Rosenbach) frames cyber risk as an "embedded endurance" problem: security is a property of how an organization continuously absorbs, recovers, and adapts, not a state achieved once. His earlier "cyber negotiation" work treats critical-infrastructure defense as a multi-stakeholder negotiation among operators, regulators, and adversaries, anticipating the governance gridlock that now dominates space. *Key works:* Falco and Rosenbach, *Confronting Cyber Risk* (Oxford University Press, 2022), doi:10.1093/oso/9780197526545.001.0001; Falco, Noriega, and Susskind, "Cyber negotiation," Journal of Cyber Policy (2019), doi:10.1080/23738871.2019.1586969.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.

Physics-informed and testable security (closing the verification gap)

Falco's recent program insists that space-system security claims must be *verifiable*: physics-informed detection (using the known orbital and signal physics of a spacecraft to flag anomalies that an attacker cannot easily fake) and testable cyber requirements for flight software. Security that cannot be tested against an adversary model is, in his terms, not security. *Key work:* Calabrese and Falco, "Physics-Informed Satellite Cybersecurity," Computer / IEEE (2024), doi:10.1109/MC.2024.3374009.

Space translation

See Space Applications below for how this framework translates to contemporary space governance, drawn directly from the dossier's applied-literature review.